Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain

I didn’t know about Ben Fountain until I read about him in Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article “Late Bloomers.” Here was a man who quit a successful career in the law to devote himself to writing, but who didn’t publish his first book until the age of 48. (My own first book came out when I was the same age, but made a much smaller splash.) Fountain and I share a fascination with Haiti, which he first visited in 1991. (I first went there in 1996, but although Fountain has been back many times I have not yet returned.)

Fountain’s collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, turns out to be excellent. In its variety of locales, sharpness of observation, and affinity with the natural world, it reminds me of the fiction of Barry Lopez, which is high praise.